Our Lady of the Harvest

Helen Moran, Corn Dolly (Kern Babby) (2009), based on a photograph of one recorded by Sir Benjamin Stone in Northumberland in 1901

The corn dolly in the above photograph is the property of the Museum of British Folklore. According to the museum's Ben Edge,

Harvest Festivals celebrated the fact that the farmers had harvested the corn and this would mean that the community had enough to eat for another year. The last corn gathered would be made into a human shape, dressed in fine clothes and crowned with flowers and called the 'Kern Baby' or 'Harvest Queen'. 

[Ritual Britain]

For all their picturesque charm, harvest festivals themselves are unfortunately a Victorian invention. In fact Steve Roud specifically fingers one particular eccentric* clergyman in north Cornwall who gloried in the name of Robert Hawker. It's quite probable that Hawker's inspiration for his harvest festivals was indeed Lammas. But harvest festivals are also normally celebrated post-harvest, in late September or early October. (In Germany they decided on the first Sunday after Michaelmas - starting in 1933, as it happens!)

In the Middle Ages, the most important actual festival during harvest time was of course today's feast of Lady Day in Harvest - Marymas, or the Feast of the Assumption, as it is better known. And in secular terms it was in all likelihood the biggest "Lady Day" on the calendar, trumping in terms of eating and drinking presumably even its original Lenten equivalent in March.† In the Sarum Missal even the Gospel reading at today's Mass (Luke 10:38-42) seems implicitly to call the reapers away from their toil at their busiest time of the year.

On the other hand, even comparatively hard-bitten folklorists concede that corn dollies (of all kinds) may very well be of ancient origin. Frazer himself crunches enough references to the kirn dolly and comparable beings from all over Europe and going back to the seventh century. And of course even in Old England, before we had the likes of John Barleycorn we had similarly mysterious characters like King Sheave.

What magical uses corn dollies may ever have been put to is still more difficult. According to Mrs Baker,

The last stalks were worked into the mysterious figure of the corn or kern-dolly, baby, maiden, or ivy-girl (dressed by Kentish women in paper cut like finest lace), and kept at the farm, emblematic of the continuity of seasons. Corn-dollies in traditional shapes - Durham chandelier, Northamptonshire horns and Suffolk horseshoe - are now sophisticated craft objects, but witch-repellent red thread still ties them and protective magic lingers. An old man who visited Cambridge Folk Museum in recent years knew of the true corn-dolly-making from his grandmother who lived in Litlington and who died in 1903 aged 75. There, until about 1848, she said, after the harvest feast at which the final plaiting of the dolly was done and it was given a special char, the farmer, accompanied only by the farm-men, carried it carefully to the parlour and put it away on the top of the corner cupboard to rest safely until the next summer. As an awestruck child, she remembered creeping in to peer at the dolly lying limply there, guardian of the next harvest. Each year for over one hundred years, a family at Whalton, Northumberland, has made a kern-baby, the height of a sheaf of corn, which is left in the church until the following year. Mrs Ridley, a recent maker of the baby, and her sister, well remember their mother and grandmother doing the work. 

[Margaret Baker, Folklore and Customs of Rural England, pp. 28-9]

As ever, the principle use of English magic is to protect against other sorts of magic!

*He became a Catholic on his deathbed. 'Nuff said!
†The second most important may well have been 'the latter Lady Day' - a term for Our Lady's birthday going back to Saxon times - on 8th September. (Funnily enough though, St Swithin's Day - itself a time hardly without magical importance - has had a similar fate: even down to the present, it is commonly reckoned to fall not on the date of the saint's death, which one would expect to be his primary feast, but on 15th July - the anniversary of the translation of his relics.)

UPDATE: I realised a few days ago that I had probably made a rod for my own back by specifying 'Anglo-Saxon magic' in my strapline. 'Anglo-Celtic' may very well be more interesting. In any case though, for some Marymas magic from north of the border, see here.

[Most Holy Name of Mary, 2025]

First Fruits

According to what I think of as "the Celtic* reckoning", August is not so much the last month of summer as the first month of autumn. Either way though, it's a harvest month. It began with Lammas, and today in the Sarum Missal we have a special blessing for grapes. 

Benedic, Dómine, et hos fructus novos uvæ, quos tu, Dómine, rore cœli, et inundatione pluviárum et temporum serenitate atque tranquillitate ad maturitatem perducere dignatus es, et dedisti eos ad usus nostros, cum gratiarum actione percipere. In nomine Domini nostri + Jesu Christi per quem omnia, Domine, semper bona creas. Qui tecum.

Two thoughts occur. Firstly, the blessing itself is significantly older than today's feast of the Transfiguration, which as Duffy points out is one of several modern feasts that were only introduced into the western liturgy in the fifteenth century - the others being the Visitation (2nd July) and tomorrow's great feast of the Holy Name of Jesus.

And secondly, of course, mediaeval England was a warmer, naturally more prosperous country than she has become. Before the age of machines and the mini ice ages of more modern times, England was indeed a land of sunshine and wine.

In Merry England, "first fruits" festivities are already well underway.

*More abstract and logical than the Anglo-Saxon, naturally!

Lammas and English Magic

In her excellent little book Winters in the World, Eleanor Parker gives two recognisable examples of Anglo-Saxon magic.

One is the Æcerbot:

The ritual is not tied to any specific time of year, but it begins at a particular time of day: the first step is to go out before the dawn and cut four pieces of turf from the four sides of the land that needs to be cured. On these, you're told to drip a mixture of oil, honey, yeast, holy water, milk from every cow that grazes on the land and portion of every tree and plant that grows there. As you drip this on the turf, you're to say 'Grow and multiply and fill this earth, in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit', as well as the Pater Noster. The pieces of turf are then taken to church, where a priest sings four masses over them, and before sunset they are replaced in the field, with a cross, made of rowan-wood and inscribed with the names of the four evangelists, buried under each one.

The ceremony then continues, with a mixture of Latin prayers taken from the liturgy and pagan prayers in Old English addressed to Mother Earth (Erce), and with various rituals of the sort of almost impossible complexity that has characterised traditional English magic down to modern times.

Kipling of course makes use of something similar to this in the first chapter of Puck of Pook's Hill:

‘Have you a knife on you?’ [Puck] said at last.

Dan handed over his big one-bladed outdoor knife, and Puck began to carve out a piece of turf from the centre of the Ring.

‘What’s that for—Magic?’ said Una, as he pressed up the square of chocolate loam that cut like so much cheese.

‘One of my little magics,’ he answered, and cut another. ‘You see, I can’t let you into the Hills because the People of the Hills have gone; but if you care to take seizin from me, I may be able to show you something out of the common here on Human Earth. You certainly deserve it.’

‘What’s taking seizin?’ said Dan, cautiously.

‘It’s an old custom the people had when they bought and sold land. They used to cut out a clod and hand it over to the buyer, and you weren’t lawfully seized of your land—it didn’t really belong to you—till the other fellow had actually given you a piece of it—like this.’ He held out the turves.

‘But it’s our own meadow,’ said Dan, drawing back. ‘Are you going to magic it away?’

Puck laughed. ‘Iknow it’s your meadow, but there’s a great deal more in it than you or your father ever guessed. Try!’

He turned his eyes on Una.

‘I’ll do it,’ she said. Dan followed her example at once.

‘Now are you two lawfully seized and possessed of all Old England,’ began Puck, in a sing-song voice. ‘By Right of Oak, Ash, and Thorn are you free to come and go and look and know where I shall show or best you please. You shall see What you shall see and you shall hear What you shall hear, though It shall have happened three thousand year; and you shall know neither Doubt nor Fear. Fast! Hold fast all I give you.’

Although the Æcerbot is not "tied" to any particular time of the year, Parker associates it with Plough Monday - the ceremonial recommencement of the farming year after Christmas. A comparable blessing that is very much connected to be a particular date of the year though is the Lammas blessing (translated from Old English, italics translated from Latin):

[Take two] long pieces of four-edged wood, and on each piece write a Pater Noster, on each side down to the end. Lay [one] on the floor of the barn, and lady the other [across] it, so they form the sign of the cross. And take four pipeces of the consecrated bread which is consecrated on Lammas Day, and crumble them at the four corners of the barn. This is the blessing for that. So that mice do not harm these sheaves, say prayers over the sheaves and [then] hang them up without speaking. City of Jerusalem, where mice do not live and cannot have power, and cannot gather the grain nor rejoice with the wheat. This is the second blessing. Lord God Almighty, who made heaven and earth, bless these fruits in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spririt. Amen. And Pater Noster.

I think we can take it for granted that the "consecrated bread" mentioned here was not supposed to be the hūsl itself but rather some early version of the bread that was blessed at the end of Mass during the Last Gospel. As Eamon Duffy describes it in his classic work The Stripping of the Altars,

A loaf of bread presented by one of the householders of the parish was solemnly blessed, cut up in a skip or basket, and distributed to the congregation. The offering of this loaf, which was regulated by a rota, was attended with considerable solemnity, the provider processing to the high altar before matins, reciting a special prayer, and offering a candel to the priest at the same time. It was usual for the curate to pray explicitly "for the good man or woman that this day geveth bread to make the holy lofe" when he bid the bedes. This holy loaf was meant to be the first food one tasted on a Sunday; eaten or simply carried in one's pocket, it was believed to have apotropaic powers. If one died without a priest, reception of the holy bread was accounted a sufficient substitute for housel.